Category: Guest Lectures

We use our ever-growing network to lure speakers from the game- & movie industry, academia and independent scene to the island. Unfortunately we’re very poor with keeping this category up to date; including the Gotland Game Conference we average 1 guest lecture every 14th day! Some of these are recorded – check the youtube channel. If you wish to speak with Sweden’s strongest game design students (or their staff), contact Ulf!

Grendel Games (Netherlands) have been making serious games since 1999!

Jan-Jaap Severs is visiting us again next week for a guest lecture on serious games and the challenges inherent to the production and design of these types of games. Jan-Jaap is one of the co-founders of Grendel Games, a studio that’s been producing validated and commercially successful serious games for twenty years now! That is a lot of experience to be listening in on.

Time: 10:00-12:00, Thu 14th MarchPlace: E22, Campus Gotland

“Dealing with stakeholders, requirements and evidence in serious games development”

During this lecture we will discuss several aspects that make serious game design and development a challenging endeavor.

We will look at managing stakeholders and domain experts with different backgrounds, who speak totally different languages. We will investigate methods of gathering requirements from these stakeholders and the common obstacles we face during that process. Finally, we will discuss the gathering and dissemination of scientific evidence of the effect of a serious game and how we can prepare for this during the design phase.

The lecture will be structured around three in-depth examples in the fields of surgery training, behavioral change pertaining to water consumption and mathematics training for children with learning disabilities.

Time: 10:00-12:00, Thu 14th MarchPlace: E22, Campus Gotland

Please note: students taking the Serious Games class must be given priority. There are only ~20 free seats available, so guests have to be prepared to sit in the stairs!

Speakers:

It’s not cheating if you call it a workflow
A game artist’s thoughts and tips after a year in the indie space and why having the skills to create appealing art is only one of the artistic challenges in shipping an indie title.

Studio Startup Survival Kit
The rosy days of the golden indie age are gone. Do you want to start a new studio but feel lost and think “where do we go from here?”. In this talk Martin will talk about their journey at Eat Create Sleep since they started their company in 2014 and give you some insight in how you could survive as a startup. Mileage may vary.

An indies Survival kit – or – How I learned to double down and love the niche
Ever wondered about the glorious life of a indie developer? Let us talk what it takes to survive out there, with the deluge of games growing by the minute? How do you stand out and what do you need to make it?

What is there to learn from the startup world?
The choice is before you to dare to team up and build your own venture in the gaming industry or spend half your life working for the “man”. We will share three key learnings from those that have tried, make clear the support, funding and connections that actually exist here on Gotland as well make sure we have answered or confirmed any questions or thoughts you have in the space.

The talk was in Swedish but Patrick recommends the book “What’s the Problem in Problem Gaming”. It is an anthology which provides a number of perspectives on the issue, such as players’ life conditions and lifestyle choices, problem gaming from a family perspective, the voices of treatment professionals, and how game design can become problematic. The book is an essential read for researchers in the field as well as for policymakers, social workers, clinical psychologists, teachers and others who encounter problem gaming in their profession, and the digital version is freely available to download here.